


Little Talks

by franticatlantic



Category: Bandom, Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 10:07:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8663392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/franticatlantic/pseuds/franticatlantic
Summary: "That's a lot of dead people," Josh says without thinking, and Tyler guffaws.





	

**Author's Note:**

> for an [anon](http://vintagetyler.tumblr.com/post/153689862793/if-you-are-so-inspired-you-write-something-where) on tumblr who wanted something with t and j both trans. enjoy!
> 
> title is from the song of the same name by of monsters & men.

Tyler sits atop his gravestone, legs crossed, hands folded on his knees. The first time they did this Josh expected him to be wearing what he was buried in - one of his old suits that his mother had scrounged up from the attic. He never is. He’s always wearing his own clothes - today it’s the black tank top and skinny jeans he used to perform in.

The sun, high in the sky, is making Josh sweat in his T-shirt and binder. A bird chirps somewhere far off and Tyler turns his face against the warmth of the sun, basking.

“Aren’t you hot in that?” Josh brandishes the flowers he’s clutching at Tyler. “Black attracts heat.”

Tyler shrugs, doesn’t answer. He inclines his head at the flowers. “Are those for me?”

Josh nods, stepping forward to hold them out. They’re nothing fancy, mostly because Josh knows nothing about flowers, just an arrangement of pinks and purples he doesn’t know the name of. They reminded Josh of Tyler’s kimono, though, so he thought they’d fit.

Tyler turns his nose up at them, though not unkindly. “I can’t take them.” He shakes his hands a little.

“Oh. Right.” Josh bends and instead sets them against the headstone - TYLER R. JOSEPH 1988 - 2016 - and there they stay, propped, for quite some time.

When he straightens, Tyler is looking at him with an unfathomable expression.

“Sorry I always come here with nothing specific to say.” Josh shoves his hands into the pockets of his shorts.

The expression on Tyler’s face changes, and he smiles wide, like he used to when Josh told a stupid joke or right after sex when they were laying together just kissing. “The flowers are beautiful. Thank you.”

Josh never got Tyler flowers when he was alive. He wishes he had, as people always wish for things they should have done before someone they loved died. “I thought you’d like them,” he says, and Tyler nods, hops from the headstone.

“Walk with me.” He begins to make his way down the hill, bypassing a murder of crows that are pecking at the dirt around another grave.

“You can leave?” Josh calls, and Tyler turns, presses the length of one finger against the side of his nose. He used to do that when he was alive, too, whenever Josh said something Tyler thought was absurd.

Josh hurries after him and when he passes the crows they scatter, cawing loudly down at him for disrupting them.

“How’s mom?” Tyler asks as the hill slopes downward and to the left. There are no grave sites here, which Josh assumes is because they’re on uneven ground. He pictures coffins slip sliding in the mud, cracking open against the mausoleum at the bottom of the hill.

“She’s okay,” Josh says, as he has every other time before. But then, “She’s getting better. Not forgetting about you, but putting you behind, I guess? Which sounds equally as bad-“

“No. That’s good. She was here last week talking to me, but I can’t show myself to her the way I can to you. I don’t know why.”

“What did she say?”

Tyler stops under a low-hanging elm, almost as if to catch his breath, though Josh has noticed he doesn’t breathe. Even so, he’s glad for it. Being in the sun today is making him feel a bit light-headed.

“She said what you said. That she was going to have to move on, to put me behind so she can live. Which is good. Because if she doesn’t - if you don’t, if you keep living in the past - that’s just as bad as you being in here with me.”

Josh nods because he supposes he agrees. Not being able to let go of the dead is as bad as being dead yourself.

“I can’t take credit for that one,” Tyler sighs, and continues on. “Jack pointed that out.”

“Jack?” Josh hastens to keep up with Tyler, but it’s hard because Tyler seems to almost flit through the air and down the hill, while Josh’s shoes keep dislodging rocks and great mounds of dirt and he stops every few inches to make sure he’s not going to fall.

“Jack Boyd. He’s buried in a field over there. He’s a friend.”

Josh chokes. “You have friends here?”

Tyler glances back with a sardonic smile. “Is that so hard to believe?”

“Uh,” Josh says, and finally reaches the bottom of the hill with sweat dripping down his back, sticking his shirt to him. “Let me rephrase. There are other people like you here?”

“Dead people? Look around you, Josh - you’re in a graveyard.”

“There’s no need to get smart, Tyler. I just mean…there are other…” He doesn’t know what to call Tyler, not really. A ghost, a spirit, a phantom. None of these fit. To Josh, he’s just Tyler. Even if he is dead.

“Of course.” Tyler wanders to the mausoleum gates. “Almost everyone here is like me. We talk at night mostly, because…” He trails off and nods through the trees.

Josh turns to see a family bawling their eyes out in a funeral procession, faces cast to the earth as they wind the trail between graves. They stop at a large headstone in the middle of the field and bow their heads further.

“He died two days ago,” Tyler informs Josh. “Massive heart attack, still doesn’t know he’s dead. He’ll come around eventually.”

A crow - perhaps one of the ones from earlier - caws raucously down at them, as though screaming. Josh has gone silent.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Tyler says quietly.

“You don’t have a penny.”

“I’ve got two in the coffin actually.”

“How?”

“Beats me.” Tyler shrugs. “Maybe Zack put them in there when no one was watching. It’s more likely whoever lowered me had two pennies in his pocket and they fell out.”

Josh hooks two fingers beneath his binder, over his shirt, and scratches.

Tyler notices. “Is that what’s bothering you?”

All at once, Josh says, “Up there, are you…?”

“Am I?”

“You know.”

Tyler knows. He smiles, softly, and lifts his shirt, revealing a tan, smooth chest. Flat. There aren’t even any scars.

Josh can’t help the stupid, open grin that stretches his lips from one side of his face all the way to the other. “I knew it. I always knew you were.”

Tyler doesn’t blush, but if he could Josh is sure he’d be doing so now. “You are, too. When you get here you’ll see.”

“I can’t wait.”

“I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry. You still have a lot left ahead of you.” Tyler passes the large, rusted iron gates and continues down a smaller dirt path to the side of the mausoleum.

“Can you see that kind of stuff?” Josh asks as he follows close behind. “The future and all that?”

“No, but I can just tell some things. And I know you have a lot left.” He glances back. “The band?”

Josh keeps his eyes down, on his dusty shoes moving along the path. Everyone has told him to continue, that that’s what Tyler would have wanted, for the band to keep going until Josh has nothing left to say. But where would he find someone like Tyler? Someone with a voice like his, the stage presence he had, but more importantly someone with his mind?

He wouldn’t. No one would ever even come close.

Tyler stops and Josh stops too and they stand on the little dirt path looking at each other. And Josh has one of those moments, when he would look around and the world would all become achingly, horribly familiar.

“You love playing music, Josh. You have to keep going.”

Josh shakes his head, and has to force the words out. “There’s no point.”

“Don’t you say that.” A pause. “I guess I should have asked. If you were putting me behind, too. Like my mom is.”

He’s not, but he can’t tell Tyler that. Can’t tell him that these visits are what he looks forward to the most in his life now, that the chance to be with Tyler is better than anything else. Sleeping, eating, even playing music. Nothing holds a candle to being able to come here and see the love of his life because he never thought he’d be able to again.

He kicks a rock. “Do you want me to stop coming here?”

“No. I want you to come for however long you need. But that can’t be forever.”

Josh knows what Tyler is afraid of. That he’ll spend his life here, that he’ll waste away in front of Tyler’s headstone and never live his life. So what? Maybe that’s what he wants.

Maybe some days he wants to off himself just to be with Tyler. He’d be buried here, too, he knows he would. It’s the closest graveyard to his house. Maybe he’d be buried right next to Tyler, like some macabre display of romance.

Almost as if he knows what Josh is thinking Tyler starts forward again, leads Josh out from behind the mausoleum and up another hill, this one less steep. To the top of the rise and a flat, even thatch of land filled with graves as far as Josh can see.

“That’s a lot of dead people,” Josh says without thinking, and Tyler guffaws.

“Only skeleton bones remain,” he says through the remnants of his laughter.

Josh scratches at his binder again. Tyler reaches out, as if to touch him, before remembering he can’t and letting his arm fall limply back to his side.

“I still can’t believe that.” Josh points to Tyler’s chest again and Tyler raises his shirt once more, shows the length of his torso, that flat chest leading down to the swell of his belly. His tattoos look just how he always wanted them to look now.

“Why’s it so hard to believe?” He asks as he lets the shirt fall. “We’re both boys, we always were.”

What Josh doesn’t tell Tyler is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for him to feel like one without Tyler there. Without Tyler calling Josh his boy, adjusting his binder for him, plugging the heating pad in beside the bed when he gets his period and the dysphoria sets in at an alarming rate.

“Are you,” he says instead, “down there?”

Tyler cups himself through his jeans and Josh just sees the outline of a penis. He exhales slowly.

“Everywhere,” Tyler assures him, and the sun starts to dip below the horizon. “You know I’d kiss you right now if I could, right?”

“Yes. I’d kiss you, too. Maybe I’ll bring a Hershey’s next time. To give you a kiss.”

“Oh, my God,” Tyler says, and puts his face in his hands. “The puns just never stop.”

“When I first met you,” Josh says suddenly, “you said I was the most handsome boy you’d ever seen. Even though I wasn’t passing very well back then. My hair was still long and I still felt uncomfortable leaving the house without makeup on in case my mom said something. But you still said I was handsome.”

“You were. You _are_.”

“That was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me.”

Tyler looks sadly at him and there’s no light in his eyes Josh realizes. Dead things in a dead face. “You have to keep going, Josh. Promise me. Promise you’ll put me behind you and keep going.”

“With the band?”

“With everything. I’m gone now and that’s not good for you, but it also doesn’t have to be the worst thing in the world.”

Josh can’t help but laugh because Tyler just asked him to ignore the fact that the love of his life is dead.

“I’m serious,” Tyler says, and Josh can see he is. “I know it’s hard sometimes. I know it’s always been hard for you. It was hard for me, too. But you have to promise.”

“Promise you?” Josh asks, unexpectedly petulant. “When you took the easy way out?”

“Yes. Promise you won’t make out like I did.”

He doesn’t know if he can make that promise, but even if he breaks it Tyler won’t really be able to blame him, will be? “I promise.”

“Thank you.” Tyler looks out at the sunset and closes his eyes. “This is my favorite time of day.”

“It always was.”

They used to take walks at dusk, so Tyler could see the sun just before it disappeared completely and left a burning sky in its wake.

“You’re my boy,” Tyler finally says, and that prompts Josh to ask, “Do you expect me to move on romantically? Go on other dates and stuff?”

“Honestly, the thought makes me kind of jealous. But yeah. In the long run, yes. You’re in your late twenties, not even halfway done with life yet. I don’t expect you to spend the next 70 years mourning your long lost love who died when you were 28.”

“But I can still come see you?”

“Whenever you need to.”

They stand in the dying light of the day, before it’ll be dark and Josh will have to leave.

And if he brings Tyler a Hersey’s kiss as a gag gift the following week, Tyler can’t really blame him.

**Author's Note:**

> i have [tumblr](http://vintagetyler.tumblr.com/).


End file.
